I don't believe it
The first four letters you printed on the “Beyond belief” conference (9 December 2006, p 24) invoke the “brilliant insight” that atheism is itself a belief. This is rubbish, and New 杏吧原创 should not be promulgating it.
An atheist simply does not believe in any gods. By definition, this is not a belief. Just as nakedness is not a way of getting dressed; sleep is not a technique for paying attention; sunlight is not a kind of shade (nor even its opposite): atheism simply means that one has no religious beliefs.
Even to call it “non-belief” is perhaps misleading. After all, when you’re feeling comfortable you don’t call it “non-pain”.
Many believers literally cannot imagine that atheism is possible. But millions of us enjoy it 鈥� all day, every day.
For the record
鈥� In the item on circumcision “To snip or not to snip” (25 November 2006, p 9), we cited the incidence of penile cancer as being 1 per 100,000 US males, but omitted to mention this was per year.
鈥� Our email address letters letters@newscientist.com has been working, at best, sporadically 鈥� sorry. Try NS.letters@rbi.co.uk
Transport tax equity
Using mobile phones to monitor and charge car drivers for the distances they travel is an ingenious idea, among many suggestions designed to cut road use (9 December 2006, p 29). There appears, however, to be an elephant in the room. The simplest way to reduce car use is to tax fuel rather than use complex technologies and elaborate indirect charges.
Fuel tax is unpopular, but charges effectively for kilometres travelled, and an additional advantage is that drivers of larger and more fuel-hungry cars pay more: and of course greenhouse gases are directly proportional to fuel use.
You also suggest that people could be charged for longer journeys and not for those in their local area. But short journeys are most polluting and make up the huge majority of car trips. They are also the most easily replaced with other forms of transport such as cycling, walking or catching the bus. If, indeed, a carbon limit was imposed upon the whole population, we would probably think twice about driving to the local shop and using up a chunk of our quota in such a trivial way.
If indirect charges on kilometres travelled were fairer then there would be an argument for them, but I cannot see how they would ameliorate the increased cost of private transport for lower-income individuals and households. That is an issue of social equity that would most certainly need to be addressed as part of an overall strategy for realistic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
Wet simulation
Nick Bostrom’s conclusion that we may live in a simulation falls to the ground if we don’t blithely assume that a simulation of a conscious entity is itself conscious (18 November 2006, p 38). Why ever should we assume this? After all, hurricanes are routinely simulated without anybody having (at least so far as am aware) to clear water out of the computer afterwards.
It's an ill wind…
The main thing the report by the Renewable Energy Foundation proves is that statistics can be spun to support your case (16 December 2006, p 7). Let us not forget the REF is a pressure group opposing onshore wind farms. The UK government’s target for average productivity for wind is 30 per cent of theoretical maximum. “Average” means that some turbines will be below 30 per cent capacity and some above. The year chosen by the REF gives an average capacity factor of 28.4 per cent 鈥� or to put it another way: “Wind turbines hit government targets by 95 per cent in 2005!”
Mitigating vCJD
There is indeed great concern over the risk of an outbreak of vCJD in the UK from blood transfusions or infected surgical instruments (16 December 2006, p 7). In order to minimise the risk of vCJD, blood, plasma, cell and tissue products are now given only when they are essential to the survival of the patient, and the benefits are carefully weighed against the transmission risks.
In August 2002 the Department of Health announced that fresh frozen plasma for treating babies and young children born after 1 January 1996 would be obtained from the US (extended to all children under 16 years of age in summer 2005).
In December 2002 the Department of Health purchased independent US plasma collection firm Life Resources for over 拢50 million. This now supplies non-UK blood plasma for the manufacture of blood plasma products such as Factor VIII.
Since April 2004, blood donations have not been accepted from people who have themselves received a blood transfusion in the UK since 1980.
Such is the risk that many countries outside the UK including the US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Israel, Hong Kong, Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Ireland have taken the precautionary step of excluding all blood donors who spent time in the UK between 1980 and 1996.
The editor writes:
鈥� It is true that numerous measures have been implemented to minimise the transmission of vCJD in blood products. What the story highlights is that there is an unknown number of people who might already have been infected with vCJD by blood transfusions. They might have donated blood prior to 2004, and recent findings show that the infection spreads more efficiently this way than from eating infected meat.
Ulcers not by bugs alone
Your interview with Barry Marshall makes it seem that it is now an accepted scientific fact that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori causes ulcers and stress does not (9 December 2006, p 53). Subsequent research has found otherwise.
See, for example, the BMJ review article (vol 316, p 538) which states: “H. pylori is inadequate as a sole explanation for peptic ulcers. Most people who harbour the organism never have ulcers, while a few who have never been infected with it or taken non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs develop ulcer disease.”
The editor writes:
鈥� We have printed articles sceptical about H. pylori: see for instance www.newscientist.com/article/mg17123033.700-dead-man-walking.html (11 August 2001, p 30).
Investigating design
Creationism is indeed worthy of serious investigation 鈥� as an exercise in social anthropology (16 December 2006, p 8). Adherents of Christianity and Judaism are not required to believe in the literal truth of scripture. In order to do so, creationists must first accept that these texts came directly from God, which raises the immediate question of how they came into existence. Were they encapsulated in a rock, perhaps a meteorite? Did they arrive in the form of a celestial email, perhaps via a modem connected to the numinal realm 鈥� to the mind of the supreme creator who conjured a material cosmos into being from eternity?
If indeed they imagine they can know the divine mind in this way, then they are claiming an authority which exceeds that which their humanity allows them. Only the numinal can fully comprehend itself; as Saint Paul points out, “we see through a glass darkly”.
We must ask, then, why groups of people are taking up such a position, especially in the light of two centuries of philology that has demonstrated the fluidity of language. One reason could be that it espouses a form of totalitarianism. In the light of the last century’s examples of totalitarianism, study of the present creationist revival could well be rewarding.
From Bob Winters
杏吧原创s have been typically moderate, patient and well-mannered with creationists. It is time to turn the tables and ask some hard questions of creationists and their theology.
If it is so easy to interpret the Bible, why are there so many Christian sects with different interpretations? If it were so critical to follow the Bible exactly, then the most important part of the Old Testament (and the easiest to interpret) would be the ten commandments. Why have Christians not kept the Sabbath (Saturday)? Does it mean that the only real believers are among those who do keep the Sabbath?
I suspect that the only thing a large number of very conservative Christians can agree on is creationism. Could it be that creationism lacks any real theology, and that is why they can agree?
Sanctuary Lakes, Victoria, Australia
Creationism and reason
So it came to pass that creationism begat intelligent design which begat Discovery Institute which begat Biologic Institute (16 December 2006, p 8). It is amusing that a creed so dedicated to refuting Darwin is itself forced to undergo continual evolution.
From Neil Paterson
There is a difficulty with the creationists’ latest ploy to invest “intelligent design” with a veneer of scientific respectability by submitting their experimental work to peer-reviewed journals, which is that no scientific experiment can have any bearing on their hypothesis.
Intelligent design essentially claims that any biological system which has, at present, no compelling explanation in terms of the historical coming-together of functioning subsystems, may be taken as evidence that only an intelligent designer can account for such a system.
But when evolutionary explanations are found, the creationists shrug and move to the next currently unexplained system. This is the sure sign of pseudoscience 鈥� the hypothesis is permanently exempted from refutation by experience.
Dundee, Fife, UK
From Tom Corley
I feel compelled to compare your article “The God lab” with the polemic of the medieval Church against the scientific discoveries of the day. Any questioning of evolution is modern-day blasphemy and must be fought against.
Personally, I believe in evolution, but I say to the proponents of intelligent design: do your research and publish your papers for peer review. If you manage to discredit evolution then you deserve a Nobel prize. New 杏吧原创 is supposed to be a magazine of science, and science is based on falsifiable theories. So let us see all scientific theories being open to being challenged and questioned. There are no sacred theories in science 鈥� so there is no place for scaremongering about anti-evolutionists. We should bid them work hard and prove us wrong.
Wotton-under-Edge, Gloucestershire, UK
From Ben Craig
Proponents of intelligent design are little different from the character O’Brien in George Orwell’s 1984, who insists that “Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth”. In a democratic society, we risk becoming inundated with these false beliefs simply because we cannot prove them wrong: this risks losing democracy altogether.
Ware, Hertfordshire, UK
Beyond green ink
Harry Collins really isn’t helping when he lumps together “Martin Fleischmann (cold fusion), Eric Laithwaite (anomalous gyroscopes), Albert Einstein (relativity), Linus Pauling (vitamin C), Alfred Wegener (plate tectonics), Thomas Gold (origin of oil), David Duesberg (non-viral causes of AIDS), and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (black holes)” (9 December 2006, p 46). All the higher-functioning purveyors of crackpot theories appear to believe that since they are laughed at, and since Wegener (for example) was laughed at, and Wegener was right, it follows that they are right.
Over the years I have taken an interest in the arguments about all of the examples Collins cites 鈥� as a literary phenomenon.
I suggest to Collins that there is a fundamental difference between these proposals, detectable before the scientific community has performed its testability rituals. That difference lies in their coherence 鈥� both internally and with others’ work.
It is, for example, a feature of the loonier proposals that once you try to map out the details of the argument you find that long passages of minute and not-very-salient detail are interspersed with huge logical leaps on which enormous implications are hung. In other words, you don’t need actual “green ink and no margins” to detect probable loonspuddery. Those proposals that eventually pan out in the world are far more likely to exhibit narrative consistency 鈥� perhaps what Edward O. Wilson calls “consilience” in his book of that name.
Good science will come
Your editorial asks a reasonable question: can the theory of intelligent design (ID) lead to good science (16 December 2006, p 5)? Researchers at the Biologic Institute are convinced it can. ID sceptics, of course, want proof.
We take that challenge seriously, which is why we insist on completing our research projects before talking about them. What you have interpreted as conspiratorial “caginess” is just scientific caution.
Your description of ID as doing nothing more than questioning Darwinism is incomplete. Cells process digital information. Humans have also developed this technology. Cells make molecular machines and complex materials by nano-fabrication. So do humans. Cells do complex chemistry, signal transduction and process control. So do humans. But Darwinism prevents what we have learned as engineers from illuminating biology, by insisting that the two modes of invention are fundamentally different.
What humans accomplish only by intellectual effort, nature puts to shame by mindless accident, we are told. If that is wrong 鈥� and we think it is 鈥� whole new fields open up, waiting to be explored. Perhaps neurobiologists would learn something from computer designers and network whizzes. Maybe systems biologists would start hanging out with systems engineers. We don’t know where all this would lead, but we are confident that good science will come out of it.